Virtual Intimacies: The Networks of Mary Penry

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Notes

¹ The term “virtual intimacy” seems to have been coined in 1994 by the video game Midnight Stranger (Douglas 207, 202n 3).

² Diaspora for Moravians was a “perpetual religious practice” rather than, as the term is used more commonly, “a temporary status” of a “minority in exile” that “strove to be reunited in its place of origin” (Freist 62–63).

³ Moravians still rely on what they call “Moravian mail.” Often when they travel, especially transatlantically, they carry items for friends or (more often) friends of friends.

⁴ Men, women, and children die peacefully and contentedly in Moravian memoirs, which differentiates these moments from the more extended death scenes in novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), or Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794).

⁵ The list of settlements and other details in Zinzendorf’s painting (described in 1831) do not match the surviving Settlement Scene (Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth). I am grateful to Paul Peucker for clarifying this.

⁶ The “almost 49 years” measured the time since Penry had emigrated from Wales – not just the 33 years since she wrote her relatives in 1760.